Voicing One’s Ideas: Intragroup Respect as an Antecedent of Assertive Behavior

In this research, we tested equality-based respect from ingroup members as a social antecedent of positive assertiveness (i.e., voicing one’s opinions) and group performance. A pretest with employees at the workplace supported that the variables of interest were indeed correlated. The main experimental study then confirmed that participants who had received high as compared with low intragroup respect displayed more assertive behavior and yielded higher group performance in dyadic intragroup discussions. In contrast, high intergroup respect (i.e., from outgroup members) lowered assertiveness and performance levels in intergroup interactions relative to low respect. We discuss implications for social interactions and discourses.     

Tendentious texts: Holocaust representations and nation-rebuilding in East German,Italian, and West German schoolbooks, 1949–1989*

This article examines how post-fascist perpetrator countries – East Germany, Italy, and West Germany – represented the Second World War and the Holocaust in middle school history textbooks. History textbooks were important actors in the creation of new democratic communities in East Germany, Italy, and West Germany. Through a transnational comparison of one leading textbook published in each country, this paper answers why and how West Germany was eventually more successful than East Germany and Italy in conveying to its youth a more nuanced and self-critical national memory of the Second World War and the Holocaust. Such knowledge is imperative, not just to understand the past, but also to provide a better grasp of how to democratize youth in the future, an important topic, given the spectre of right-wing ethno-nationalism that has seen a revival in recent years.     

Do People Order Cues by Retrieval Fluency when Making Probabilistic Inferences?

In multiple‐cue probabilistic inferences, people infer alternatives' unknown values on decision criteria, using alternatives' attributes as cues. Some inferential strategies, like take‐the‐best, assume that people consider relevant cues sequentially in order of decreasing validity. This assumption has been deemed cognitively implausible by some, who suggest memory retrieval principles to guide cue order. We test whether memory‐based inferences are better described by a model considering cues in order of validity or in order of memory retrieval. In an experiment, we manipulated the frequency with which cues appeared in a learning phase, increasing retrieval fluency of cue values related to the more frequently appearing cue. In a subsequent decision phase, participants made a series of two‐alternative decisions based on the learned cue values. We compared two sequential sampling models, which differed in whether cues are sampled in order of subjective cue validity or in order of retrieval fluency. To model retrieval order of cues in the fluency sampling model, we used the declarative memory theory embedded in the ACT‐R cognitive architecture. Most participants' decisions were best described by the model sampling cues in order of memory retrieval. Only a minority of participants were classified as sampling cues by validity. Our result suggests that retrieval fluency is the primary driver of cue order in inferences from memory, irrespective of the cues' validities. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Internal control beliefs and reference frame concurrently impact early performance monitoring ERPs

This study investigated the impact of criterion-based vs. social reference frames on behavioural and neural correlates of performance monitoring while taking individual differences in control beliefs into account. We conducted two experiments administering a time estimation task in which feedback was either delivered pertaining to participants’ own performance (nonsocial/criterion-based reference) or to the performance of a reference group of previous participants (social reference). In Experiment 1, 34 male volunteers participated. To test generalizability of the observed results to both sexes/genders, we recruited 36 female volunteers for Experiment 2. P2 and P300 amplitudes were generally larger in social than in nonsocial reference trials in the male participants of Experiment 1. ΔFRN amplitudes were larger for social compared to non-social reference trials in Experiment 1. No effects of reference frame were found in the female sample of Experiment 2. Rather, P2 and ΔFRN effects showed opposing patterns for nonsocial versus social reference frames. However, stronger internal control beliefs were accompanied by larger FRN amplitudes of negative social reference trials in both samples, suggesting generalizable effects independent of sex/gender. Enhanced P2 and ΔFRN amplitudes for social versus nonsocial reference trials suggest enhanced attentional capture and higher saliency of socially framed feedback in male participants only. In both sexes/genders, however, the social reference frame possibly challenges internal control beliefs and by this enhances performance monitoring. Our results demonstrate the complex interplay of trait variables and reference frames during performance monitoring influencing our daily lives-reference frames are omnipresent in education and one’s working environment.